Cain’s wife and brother-sister intermarriage

Published: 14 May 2011(GMT+10)

iStockphoto

Nicholas J. from the USA disputes our solution for Mrs Cain because of the Mosaic
Law against brother-sister intermarriage, and proposes an alternative. Dr Jonathan
Sarfati of CMI–US (formerly CMI–Australia) defends our solution, explains
the reason for the Jewish law, and why it didn’t apply to Cain.

To whomever is reading this from creation.com. First let me say that I have found
your website very helpful in many ways. My wish in sending you this message is to
strengthen your undertaking and to help those who visit your website who are searching
for good answers.

I have read much of what creation.com presents on the topic of Cain’s wife,
and I have to say that I am in disagreement with what I find. I commend the authors
who have written the material on your website for diligently working toward uniting
the clear message of scripture with an understanding of all creation and history.
However, I am in disagreement with the answer presented here, and I hope you will
allow me to offer another view that has the same intentions of uniting Scripture
with all of life. I present this view in the following paragraphs:

Question: Where did Cain’s wife come from?
Answer: It is very likely that God formed a wife for Cain from
his own body in the same way that God formed a wife for Adam. It is also possible
that God could have formed her from the ground.

Many will say that God could not have created other people outside of Adam and Eve
because the rest of the Bible is clear that we are all in Adam. For instance, the
Bible is clear that sin entered the world through one man (Romans 5:12). However, it is a non sequitur to conclude
from this verse that all people must be physical descendents of Adam. The Bible
says that all Christians are in Christ, but are all Christians physical descendants
of Jesus? Of course not, for then no Christians would exist. Just as Christ is made
a federal head for those who believe in Him, so is Adam made the federal head of
all mankind by being the first man to be created.

For those who are not persuaded by the argument in the last paragraph, I point out
that if Cain’s wife were created from his own body, formed in his own image
and likeness, the woman would still be a physical descendant of Adam. For Cain’s
wife to come from his own body seems to fit best with the Biblical story as a whole.

Many have argued that Cain simply married one of his sisters. I believe that this
answer is an impossibility. Those who hold to this answer concede that God gave
laws forbidding sexual acts between close relatives (Leviticus 18; Deuteronomy 27), but they argue that God did not give
these laws until the time of Moses, and so early humans (including Cain) were excluded
from these laws. However, this argument fails for the reason that God’s moral
law is unchanging. If the moral law of God has no meaning until it is given, then
Cain also did no wrong in murdering his brother Abel, and yet God holds him responsible
for it. For the ‘sister argument’ (if I may call it that) to work, incest
must be considered ceremonial or civil law, but it is clear from the context of
Leviticus 18 and Deuteronomy 27 that we are to consider incest to be
moral law. If it is indeed moral law, then it is impossible for God to have commanded
mankind to multiply and fill the earth by means of incest, for God would have been
commanding disobedience unto Himself.

Furthermore, we must consider the reason that God gives for forbidding incest, or
as the Bible expresses it, uncovering the nakedness of a relative: ‘for their
nakedness is your own’ (Lev. 18:10). Those who argue that Cain married one of his
sisters claim that the law against incest was only given at a later time in order
to protect people from biological defects, but that is not the reason that God gives
for His commandment.

The argument is often made that incest could not be inherently against God’s
moral law if He blessed the marriage of Abraham and Sarah, who were half-siblings.
This argument can be refuted quite simply. Does God only bless people and their
actions if they are sinless? I should hope not. If that were true, no one would
be saved. The refutation of this argument is the Gospel.

Dear Mr J.

Thank you for writing to us with your thoughts, and for your kind comments about
our site.

A serious problem with your view is that there is simply not the slightest hint
in the Bible that Cain’s wife was miraculously created. Only Adam and Eve
were created without ancestors, and after that, only Jesus was born without a human
father. All other humans who have ever lived were the result of generation, not
creation, which was finished after Day 6 (Genesis 2:1–3).1 Thus all humans
are born “in Adam”, while we are born again in Christ, clearly
stated to be spiritual, as John 1:12–13 says:

Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his
name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural
descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

It would be better to say that God’s moral standard does not change, reflecting His unchanging nature. But because
the Bible records Heilsgeschichte (salvation history), the individual commands change
to conform to His unchanging standard as the Messianic Program is being worked out
through history.

Also, your argument on its own might be defeated by saying, “So what?
Cain was a murderer, so why should he care about an alleged divine law against brother-sister
intermarriage?” But I won’t resort to that as a defense of the truth of the
whole Bible, because there is a similar problem with Adam’s unfortunately
lesser-known son Seth, our ancestor: where did he get his wife? Was she
specially generated as well? Or did he marry one of Cain’s daughters, his
own niece, although Cain had been exiled by then? And for that matter, where did
Cain’s son Enoch get his wife, given that Cain was exiled? Brother-sister
marriage is inescapable, unless we resort to more such deus ex machina
explanations of special creations of more women.

Another problem is this artificial separation of moral and ceremonial laws. Surely
every law God gives is a ‘moral law’, in that it would be immoral to
disobey. The Mosaic Law of 613 commandments is a unity, which is why James told
us that breaking one commandment was breaking the whole Law (James 2:10). And were we to categorize the law that Adam
broke, it would come under ‘ceremonial’ since it was a prohibited food
law.

It would be better to say that God’s moral standard does not change, reflecting His unchanging nature (see also What is ‘good’? (Answering the Euthyphro Dilemma)).
But because the Bible records Heilsgeschichte (salvation history), the
individual commands change to conform to His unchanging standard as the Messianic
Program is being worked out through history. For example, God’s eternal plan
was that Christ’s death and resurrection would enable the salvation of those
written in the Book of Life from the foundation of the world (see
The Incarnation: Why did God become Man?). Thus during the Mosaic period,
it was moral to sacrifice animals to cover sin; after Christ’s death and Resurrection,
it is now immoral to do so because that would deny the perfection of Christ’s
work for us, taking away sin (Hebrews 10).

Similarly, God told Adam and Eve to eat plants (except for one), after the Flood
He permitted Noah to eat any animal as well, but during the Mosaic Law, God forbade
the eating of certain types of animal. Under the Law of Christ, we may now eat the
animals that were forbidden under Moses. At any of these times, it would have been
immoral to eat anything God had forbidden.

God told Adam and Eve to eat plants (except for one), after the Flood He permitted
Noah to eat any animal as well, but during the Mosaic Law, God forbade the eating
of certain types of animal. Under the Law of Christ, we may now eat the animals
that were forbidden under Moses. At any of these times, it would have been immoral
to eat anything God had forbidden.

Like you with the incest law, I would de-emphasize the health benefits of the Mosaic
food laws, and look to the symbolism: at this stage of the outworking of the Messianic
Program, the Messianic People were to be separate from the surrounding nations.
Thus the laws repeatedly had ritual separation: no clothes made from a mixture of
fabrics; no eating lobster, because the legs on a sea creature violated the ritual
boundary between sea and land.

When it comes to the law at hand, there is simply no evidence from practice or logical
deduction from Scripture that brother-sister intermarriage was God’s command
until it was given. The command in Leviticus 18:10 just says,

“Do not have sexual relations with the daughter of your
father’s wife, born to your father; she is your sister.”

A reason might be that by this stage of the Messianic program, the family was regarded
as an extension of one’s own flesh (cf. Genesis 2:24), and violating “any flesh of his flesh”
was then a sin (Leviticus 18:6). But as the scholarly 19th-century
commentary by Jewish Christian scholars
Keil and Delitzsch point out:

“There Cain knew his wife. The text assumes it as self-evident that she accompanied
him in his exile; also, that she was a daughter of Adam, and consequently a sister
of Cain. The marriage of brothers and sisters was inevitable in the case of the
children of the first men, if the human race was actually to descend from a single
pair, and may therefore be justified in the face of the Mosaic prohibition of such
marriages, on the ground that the sons and daughters of Adam represented not merely
the family but the genus, and that it was not till after the rise of several families
that the bands of fraternal and conjugal love became distinct from one another,
and assumed fixed and mutually exclusive forms, the violation of which is sin.”

But this is still a reflection of God’s unchanging standard, which
was the protection of humanity. Originally, any man could marry any woman. But by
the time of Moses, we can see from the decreased life spans that many harmful mutations
had accumulated (see Living for 900
years). So God maintained His standard by now forbidding close intermarriage,
to minimize the chance of harmful mutations being expressed in the offspring—a
problem that didn’t exist with the children of the genetically perfect first
couple.

“This sometimes causes people to ask if that makes God inconsistent—isn’t
He changing His standards? Imagine a shepherd looking after his flock on an open
meadow. There are no wild animals around, and the only danger to the sheep is at
one end of the meadow, where there are some cliffs from which they could fall down.
So the shepherd builds a fence, but only around the cliffs. That fence represents
a law, a ‘Thou shalt not’. There is no need to fence the rest of the
meadow.

“Some time later, wolves move into the district. Now there is a new danger
to the sheep; if they stray beyond the sight of the shepherd, they risk being killed
and eaten. So a new set of rules is called for, a new ‘Thou shalt not’,
and the shepherd now puts a fence around the entire meadow.

“The shepherd’s standards have not changed; his loving care for the
flock is the same as always. But times have changed, and a new law is called for
in order to express that loving care.

“In the same way, having permitted intermarriage between close relatives in
order to commence humanity from one man (and one woman who also came from that one
man), a point was reached where God clearly chose to institute a new law which was,
like in the case of the sheep, a benefit to them, for their own protection.”

Finally, why was Cain guilty of murder although the Mosaic Commandment had not been
given (and why were the Sodomites guilty of sexual sin before the Mosaic commands
against homosexual
behaviour)? Answer: before Moses, God had written the moral law on people’s
hearts. This is not directly stated in Genesis, but is logically deducible from
Romans 2:14–15:

(Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature
things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not
have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts,
their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them
and at other times even defending them.)

God’s writing the Law on the hearts of the early biblical characters makes
far more biblical sense than a special creation of their wives.

Related Media

References

Without father or mother, without genealogy, without beginning
of days or end of life, like the Son of God he remains a priest forever.

However, the description “Without father or mother, without genealogy”
refers to the fact that these are not recorded in Scripture, and were not necessary
for his type of priesthood, in contrast to the Levitical (cf. v. 6). He was made
like the son of God, not the Son of God himself; the likeness was in terms of the
sort of priesthood, where he was a type of Christ. He could not have been the pre-incarnate
Christ, because a priest must be human, while the Second Person of the Trinity took
on humanity only at the Incarnation (see
The Incarnation: Why did God become Man?). Rather, the name is a typical
Jebusite name, like Adonizedek, making it likely that he was an exceptionally godly
priest-king but still a normal man. Return to text.

Besides the many thousands of articles that are freely available on this site, our staff answer many hundreds of emails in response to it. Help us help advance the Gospel. Support this site

Comments closed

Readers’ comments

Judi W.,Australia

Thank you both for your articles on Cain’s wife and intermarriage. Definitely food for thought. I love it that an analytical mind can pull apart such issues and clarify them Dr Sarfati, your comments and conclusions have made this so much easier to understand. It is clear that God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, but that life thru the ages has changed and God always meets us where we are at. He is a good GOD.

Kevin Moritz,USA

As familiar as I am with CMI’s site—and specifically with the answers to the ‘Cain’s wife’ question—I’m again amazed at how much new material I find here and how comprehensive the answer is. Although I’ve shared the CMI view, of course, for many years, I now have much more reason to agree with them than I had before. Dr Sarfati again gives far more reasons to believe what I already believed than I had before—factors I might never have thought of on my own.

Deborah F.,USA

Wonderful article, and the best explanation I have heard for this. I have long believed this was Cain’s sister, but hearing the details of why this didn’t break any law will make it simpler to explain to people. Also, the bit about the food laws, which is a point many attempt to use to make God seem inconsistent, will be very helpful!

Greg Demme,USA

Great defense of Scripture! Let us also remember the simple scriptural truth proclaimed in Gen. 3:20—“The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.” That statement by itself disallows any other special creations after Adam and Eve.

Irma L.,South Africa

Dr Sarfati, thank you for your wonderful explanation about the ‘Cain’s wife’ matter. I’ve always believed that she would have been one of his sisters (due to no further and important other explanation in the Bible). God would not have let it be wrong after creating such a magnificent creation. Your explanation, as mentioned by others, makes it much easier to understand oneself and to explain to others.

Jason M.,United States, 25 July 2012

The Bible never says we can eat any animal, challenge you to find that. In fact, Noah took 7 clean animals and only a pair of each unclean animal. Peter’s dream of eating unclean foods was about teaching the Gentiles the message not about diet. That verse is taken out of context when the explanation for the dream is given only a few verses past the “permission” to eat anything. I would say that some of the Mosaic laws were more about health and could stand, whereas some were more about tradition and were done away with with the fulfillment by Jesus. We still bury the dead, export waste out of the living areas and should be treating our bodies as the temple. Eating unclean foods is very much still against the Biblical teaching for healthy living, ask any dietician or doctor.

The author skillfully reinforces the concept that God’s commands are for our own protection. Behaviors are classified as sins because they are harmful to us.

Chris B.,United States, 28 October 2012

I hate to throw a rock in the gears of either argument but I must. Adam from what I read is considered the first man,

Jonathan Sarfati responds: Indeed he was. Paul states in 1 Corinthians 15:45: “The first man Adam became a living being”

CB: but this is a problem. In Genesis 1 God made animals on the 5th day and man on the 6th.

JS: Actually, God made land animals on Day 6.

CB: In Genesis 2 God makes man and sees is alone so he makes from the land beast, fowl, cattle etc. Why does this sequence change?

JS: It doesn’t—Genesis 2 merely fills out historical sequence of the creation of mankind, which is very brief in Genesis 1. As we documented long ago in Genesis contradictions?, the correct translation of wayyitser in Genesis 2:19 is the pluperfect “had formed”. That is, God brought Adam the animals He had formed earlier on Day 6 for Adam to name. This naming was an exercise of authority that God gave mankind in Genesis 1:28.

CB: When Cain is sent into the bad lands he expresses his fear of other people. Who are these people who do not know him, and he does not know? If Adam and Eve are the first 2 people wouldn’'t he have an alliance with his brothers and through Adam.

JS: Quite the opposite: these would also be brothers of the righteous Abel who would want to avenge his foul murder. Total strangers would have no motivation.

CB: It is not like they had news papers and would know that he killed his brother. The Bible also expresses that Cain and Abel are the first sons so wouldn’t they know their siblings anyway. So who are these people that he encounters?